Author: Paul Tomblin

This looks incredibly promising

Thanks to a post by Skud, I’ve discovered Freebase, which is, as Skud described it, “crack for information nerds”. It appears to be exactly what I was hoping to develop or find for my aviation navigation data project – a flexible structured information agregator, almost like a wiki with user definable fields.

You probably can’t see much of it, because right now it’s in alpha and by invitation only, but so far they’ve imported all of Wikipedia and added some links between then, and people have written some demo applications.

Like many AJAX applications, it has a tendency to get the dreaded “a script on this page is running slowly”, but otherwise it’s pretty nifty.

Spoke too soon

Yesterday I wrote that I’d turned off the old machine for the last time. Well, it turns out I was wrong. I had put the mp3s in the wrong location, and had the permissions wrong, and so the backup script’s rsync deleted the mp3s from the wrong place and then couldn’t write them to the correct place. Which meant that this evening I had to turn the old machine back on, copy the mp3s back over (only having to reboot the old machine twice as it froze up under heavy load as it is prone to do) and then shut down the old box once again. Now that that’s done, I have to re-import my iTunes library, which will undoubtedly continue long after I’ve gone to bed tonight.

On the plus side, though, I managed to get the UPS software NUT installed and working. My new box doesn’t have a serial port, which means I had to use the USB driver for the first time. The kernel first identifies the UPS as a X Box controller (xpad), but eventually the newhidups driver figured it out.

Cutover complete

The old box is shut down, hopefully never to be turned on again, and the new box is up and running with nearly all the old functionality. It’s very quiet in this office with that old beast off.

As well as the base install, and fixing all the Ubuntu stupidity (and a few bugs in the munin-node scripts), I had to install and configure all the following:

Apache2
Postfix
Postgresql
MovableType
Bind
user accounts
bogofilter
spamassassin
Root cronjobs
ssh tunnel
My cronjobs
trn
/etc/profile
Mutt configuration
munin
squirrelmail
iptables/ssh-black
frm/nfrm
ftp server
NFS export /mp3s

I still need to get nut set up to control the UPS, and hook up a printer and configure it. I’d also like to get Java and eclipse set up so I can do some work on it.

Right now iTunes is cranking away importing the “iTunes Music Library.xml” where I changed the old nfs mount point to the new one. It’s taking a while.

More ubuntu weirdness

  1. Ubuntu is set up to use anacron, but the /etc/crontab is set up to not run the /etc/cron.daily stuff if anacron is installed by surrounding the normal “run-parts /etc/cron.daily” with “test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ()”. Which is unnecessary because there is already a “0anacron” file in /etc/cron.daily to update the anacron timestamp if it’s being run out of cron instead of anacron. This means that there is no way I can get the /etc/cron.daily stuff to run at night when the system is idle instead of at 7am when I’m reading my morning email. I had to change the runtime in /etc/crontab to 3am, and delete the anacron checking. We’ll see tomorrow if that helps.
  2. Ubuntu installs findutils and slocate. findutils has an /etc/cron.daily job called “find” that runs updatedb. slocate installs its own updatedb and moves the findutils one to updatedb.notslocate. It has an /etc/cron.daily job called “slocate” that also runs updatedb. The slocate deb file moves /etc/cron.daily/find, but instead of doing something useful like moving it where it won’t get executed, or updating it so that it runs the findutils version of updatedb, it just renames it to /etc/cron.daily/find.notslocate. So slocate’s updatedb gets run twice every night. That’s pretty useless.

I’m getting the impression that Ubuntu, in spite of all the hype, is a pretty damn amateurish operation.